Related papers: Planck scale effects on the stochastic gravitation…
Vacuum of Quantum Chromodynamics in very strong (hadron-scale) magnetic fields exhibits many interesting nonperturbative effects. Some of these effects can be studied with the help of lattice simulations in quenched QCD. We review our…
Using the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) equation of state (EoS) from lattice calculations we investigate effects from QCD on primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) produced during the inflationary era. We also consider different cases for…
We discuss some peculiar properties of the stochastic graviton background predicted by string cosmology. At Planckian times, for the values of the parameters of the model which are more interesting for the detection in gravitational wave…
Recently, we introduced a non-perturbative quantization of impulsive gravitational null initial data. In this note, we investigate an immediate physical implication of the model. One of the quantum numbers is the total luminosity carried to…
We investigate the phase transition within an extremely strong magnetic background field, employing a holographic Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) model with a focus on entropy and pressure properties. At relatively modest magnetic field…
Relying only on the standard model of elementary particles and gravity, we study the details of a new source of gravitational waves whose origin is in quantum physics. Namely, it is well known that massless fields in curved backgrounds…
The existence of a stochastic gravitational wave background is indicated by the recent pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments. We study the enhanced production of second-order gravitational waves from the scalar perturbations when the…
We compute the corrections to the primordial power spectrum that should arise in realistic inflationary scenarios if there exists a generic covariant ultraviolet (UV) cutoff, as commonly motivated by considerations of quantum gravity. The…
In the present thesis, the author reviews the physics of cosmological first-order phase transitions that may have occured shortly after the Big Bang. Such transitions proceed via the nucleation and expansion of true vacuum bubbles and give…
Gravitational waves offer an unprecedented opportunity to look into the violent high-energy processes happening during the reheating phase of our Universe. We consider a Hubble-induced phase transition scenario as a source of a…
We propose a mechanism borrowed from string theory which yields a non-singular transition from a phase of Ekpyrotic contraction to the expanding phase of Standard Big Bang cosmology. The same mechanism converts the initial vacuum spectrum…
A finite vacuum energy density implies the existence of a UV scale for gravitational modes. This gives a phenomenological scale to the dynamical equations governing the cosmological expansion that must satisfy constraints consistent with…
We assume that the cosmological dark matter is composed of massive neutral scalar particles that decay into two massless particles. The decay produces a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs) via a 'memory effect' mechanism. We…
In recent work we analyzed the evolution of primordial perturbations satisfying Planck-scale-modified dispersion relations and showed that there is no cosmological "squeezing" in the critical model that produces perturbations with a scale…
The cosmological stochastic gravitational-wave background produced by the mildly non-linear evolution of density fluctuations is analyzed, in the frame of an Einstein-de Sitter model, by means of a fully relativistic perturbation expansion…
We discuss a recently introduced strategy to study non-perturbatively thermal QCD up to temperatures of the order of the electro-weak scale, combining step scaling techniques and shifted boundary conditions. The former allow to renormalize…
We derive the effects of a non-zero cosmological constant $\Lambda$ on gravitational wave propagation in the linearized approximation of general relativity. In this approximation we consider the situation where the metric can be written as…
First order phase transitions in the early universe can give rise to a stochastic background of gravitational waves. A hypothetical first order electroweak phase transition is particularly interesting in this respect, since the signal is in…
Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) have reported evidence for a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background at nHz frequencies, possibly originating in the early Universe. We show that the spectral shape of the low-frequency (causality) tail of…
Thermal corrections in classically conformal models typically induce a strong first-order electroweak phase transition, thereby resulting in a stochastic gravitational wave background that could be detectable at gravitational wave…